I am developing an AJAX application and in the process of doing this I am creating many small JS files that will eventually be concatenated and minified in the production release. However in development I will be working with the individual uniminified files.
The issue I have is that I am using Kate in Ubuntu as my editor and when I make small errors like an extra comma in a JSON structure, or an extra parenthesis, colon, semi-colon, or other simple syntax error I have no way of knowing until I see it in Firebug or IE Developer Toolbar (run in a VM). Unfortunately Firebug isn’t very good at identifying which line has the syntax error and only IE complains about extra commas. If I could see these mistakes in real-time like a good modern IDE it would be awesome. However, I’ll settle for any syntax checking solution that doesn’t require me to copy and paste each file from my local machine into a text area.
Also, JSLint goes a bit overboard with it’s checking. Half of the things it complains about I do intentionally.
What are my options?
jshint ( http://www.jshint.com/ )is one of the descendants of jslint after several people had also such problems with jslint (being too opinionated).
You could do similar things I guess with jshint as well as it is done by jslint here: http://sergioserra.posterous.com/using-jslint-with-kate
Personally, I used vim with jslint (with a much more permissible configuration than the default), which was checking syntax live.
Another alternative is Closure Linter from Google: https://developers.google.com/closure/utilities/